How to make more money in a service business without hiring a team
Make the business profitable with just you first. A team plugged into an unprofitable business doesn't fix it. It becomes a drain.
The logic almost nobody questions
There's a belief I run into constantly: "If I don't have employees, I have to do everything myself."
Fact: if you don't have employees, someone has to do all the work, and that someone is you. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But that belief assumes that hiring employees SUBTRACTS work from your plate.
And for most people, at the stage they hire, it doesn't. It adds a different kind of work, and often, a heavier kind.
When you bring an employee into a business that doesn't yet have reliable systems, they don't magically become efficient. They follow your lead, and if you're overwhelmed and winging it, they'll be overwhelmed and winging it too. So now you're managing them, checking their work, keeping them accountable, probably without much management experience yet, because why would you have any. They might take a few things off your plate, but they put management ON it. Except now there's payroll.
And underneath all of it is a piece of logic almost nobody questions: you hire the person, the person lets you take on more work, the work brings in more money, and the money pays for the person. It sounds airtight.
It's backwards, and I ran my business on it for years.
What happened when it was just us
We hired employees to scale up at a point when we did NOT have a reliable way to bring in leads and close them. So we struggled to make enough money to actually support the team.
One year, we brought in $250,000 in revenue and were still unprofitable. We could not afford our own employees at a quarter of a million dollars because the business beneath them wasn't built to support them.
When we were forced to let them go 'cause we really couldn't afford them anymore, it also forced us to get really clear on our systems, our delivery, our efficiency, and the actual profitability of our offer.
And the next year, just us, we not only made more profit but also doubled our revenue.
Double! And without employees and all that overhead, we actually got to keep a whole lot more of what we earned.
Not because we worked harder but because we fixed some fundamental issues about our message, offer, and delivery. (The longer version of that year is on the Small on Purpose page.)
The easy diagnosis
You have a team, you generate revenue, but you still don't make enough. Or, even without a team, you work constantly on projects and still don't make enough. Both are clear indicators that your offers are unprofitable.
So where does more money come from?
Solo growth comes from three things: increasing the real and perceived value of what you deliver, decreasing the time it takes you to deliver it, and building enough demand that you can raise your prices.
You can do all three without hiring a single person. The Lead Product raises the real and perceived value of what you offer. Intensives cut the time you spend delivering. And everything I teach about demand and referrals is how you earn the right to raise your prices, because you can only charge more when you're actually in demand.
Is there a ceiling?
Yes, obviously, there is a cap on staying solo. You're not gonna make a billion dollars.
For most solo experts, especially those of us serving other small businesses, a realistic ceiling is between $250,000 and $500,000 a year. It can go higher; there are solo consultants serving high-end corporate clients making well into seven figures, but for most people, that's not the number.
For the vast majority of the people I work with, making $250,000 to $500,000 a year WITH real freedom and flexibility is not a disappointment; it's the dream.
What about a VA?
Contractors and VAs have a place, often earlier. But even there, the mistake most of us make is hiring a VA because we're drowning, and then expecting them to solve problems we've created and don't yet know how to solve ourselves. You can't outsource your way out of that. You have to understand how your own business works before someone else can help you run it.
Not yet, and not from here
I am not anti-employee. I have hired people since, in my current business. But I hired once I had the profitability and sales machine to support it.
So my message isn't "never hire." It's "not yet, and not from here." Build the profitable, efficient, systematized version of your business FIRST. That's the No BS Business Model, and it's the path whether or not you ever want employees.
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